The New York Baroque Dance Co.

2023 EMA Summit Presentations

Over 200 people from across the country, Canada and even as far as South America attended the first Early Music Summit. We saw old friends and made new ones. The sense of community was inspiring and I felt honored to be a part of it.

Among the many presentations the ones which meant the most to me as a producer/performer of historical dance are the following:

NAGAMO: A Case Study in Collaboration & Decolonization (Lecture-Performance) Presenters: Jacob Gramit, musica intima Artistic Manager and Lucy Smith

Revolving around Elizabethan choral music by Byrd, Tallis, and Gibbons, NAGAMO  features the unique musical perspective of Andrew Balfour’s reimagining of these motets into Cree and Ojibway.  The video footage showed the work in performance with a mixed audience of engaged First Nation people and the usual early music audience. The integrated programming included indigenous music and song.

I was reminded of The New York Baroque Dance Company collaboration with the Shinnecock Indians in 2009 at the CW Post Campus Long Island University.

From Gramit and Smith I became aware of how to take our own project deeper into the community and how necessary it is to be open to others joining the project. There own project was structured with an open end, allowing things to grow and change.

Touring Music’s Stories (special format presentation)
Presenter: Bill Barclay, Artistic Director, Music Before 1800

Mr. Barclay gave a very clear and inspiring talk on how to create a music/theater production through collaboration. He also stressed the advantages of inviting artists from different fields into the sandbox to help develop the initial idea.  Challenges of funding can be met with presenters agreeing to sharing costs of the production in exchange for being on the premiere tour of the work. Even if the funding is not released until the performance, the notion of promised money is a way to get other funders involved. There are so many fascinating stories in dance history waiting to be told, surely our field can do this!

Uniting through dance in the 18th Century (performance-workshop)
Presenters: Julia Bengtsson, dancer/choreographer, and Patricía García Gil, fortepiano

Looking at the development of the minuet in a combined workshop and performance, the audience experienced a journey through time and space by listening, watching and ultimately moving to music dedicated to the minuet – which dominated the dance floor for almost a century and spread from France across Europe and to the colonies. Bengtsson and Garcia Gil are a great team and we all hope they go more deeply into this project so we can hear more from them on this important subject drawing much attention from the field.

Building on Bach: Six New Suites for Solo Cello (lecture-performance)
Presenter: Jessica Korotkin, cello

Inspired by the creative practices of the eighteenth-century performer-composer, Ms. Korotkin created six cello suites drawing on the music and compositional methods of Bach. This process helped her to expand her approach to historically informed performance practice through discovering the composer-performer within.  As I listened to her speak, I thought of dance and how we automatically analyze period choreographies in order to choreograph new works in the Baroque style. But there is something for dancers to learn about the importance of theory in addition to the practical questions. Her passion for theory erupted into a creative experience for her which was evident in the new music. If historical dancers could go more deeply into theory I think we would feel something similar.

Concerts were of a very high level. I especially appreciated the Young Performers Festival held each day. The summit closed with EMA’s Annual Awards Ceremony & Emerging Artists Showcase [ES]
Marie Nadeu-Tremblay, baroque violin was unforgettable. Please see her perform live whenever you can. The Fooles, 17th century chamber ensemble took us to another level! And Maryse Legault, historical clarinet, with Gili Loftus, fortepiano, astounded me with the beauty of their instruments and a soul-felt performance by Legault.

In conclusion, for the historical dance community, I would like to quote Lynn Garafola from her book, Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance: “  A deep current of anti-intellectualism runs throughout the dance world, a mistrust of scholarly analysis, of probing beyond the evident, of questioning the truthfulness of received wisdom.”  (2005, viii) I believe this is true and I would like to ask our historical dance community to join the Early Music America Summit next year. I am sure you will experience a different kind of summit where the presenters are both theorists and practitioners and the excitement of the presence of history in today’s world is palpable.